Riding in Cars With Boys by Beverly Donofrio

Author:Beverly Donofrio
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781860499470
Publisher: Virago Press Ltd
Published: 1992-01-01T14:02:31+00:00

The next morning, we didn’t talk. We took our last two hits of speed and set to cleaning the house. Fay took the kitchen and the bathroom. I took the living room and the bedrooms. After a couple of hours I heard the kettle whistling in the kitchen and sat down at the table for a break. Fay had finished the kitchen. The counters were bare and shiny and the emerald-green floor looked like it was covered with ice. She’d picked bright yellow flowers for the table, and by the end of the day there’d be flowers in every room, including on the tank of the toilet. As I sipped my tea—from a cup Fay always made sure had a saucer beneath it—I thought how much better life was now that Fay was my roommate. I watched her take the cellophane off my Kools and crinkle it in her fingers, which moved like spiders’ legs. I felt like I was studying a person who was alone. She bit the inside of her lip and began forming the cellophane into a sculpture of a discus thrower. Fay was a great artist. Back in high school, when the art teacher asked her to paint a Santa on the glass ramp between two buildings, she painted him giving the finger. When the teacher told her to go erase it, she erased everything but the hand with the finger, and got two weeks’ detention.

Fay was only five feet tall, and everything about her was miniature, except her hair, which was like a lion’s mane. It was in two thick and long pigtails that stuck out from the sides of her head and draped over the tops of her arms to her elbows. I thought she was beautiful. She thought I was too. She said I had a classic Roman nose and an interestingly angular face. She’d done several sketches of me during our evenings alone. She said she would make a painting one day when she could afford oils. She said she’d call it Beverly. I wondered how long living together would last. I supposed it would end as soon as one of us fell in love. Maybe that’s why we always made fun of each other’s men, because each of us was afraid the other would get too attached. Fay got up and put Carole King on the stereo. I wondered if she thought about me whenever she heard “You’ve Got a Friend,” the way I thought about her. I sat back, closed my eyes, and realized I was actually happy.

We’d made a deal with Lenny for that night. He’d use our house to sell eleven pounds of marijuana, because his bus was being watched by the police, and we’d get an ounce of pot for our trouble. Since Fay and Lenny had to stay home to sell the pot anyway, Fay would baby-sit for Jason while I went on a date with this guy named Brad I saw sometimes, even though Amelia was spending the night at her grandmother’s.

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